City Financial’s Adviser Centre, a fund research and recommendation service headed by former OBSR directors Peter Toogood and Gill Hutchison, has seen more than 200 adviser firms sign up in its first two months.
The group is also teaming up with Distribution Technology, which has 3,800 adviser customers, to launch an upgrade to DT’s fund search engine Dynamic Planner.
The initiative will see Adviser Centre’s recommendations embedded within the DT search engine.
Adviser Centre, which launched in May, provides what Mr Toogood called “a window” into City Financial’s multi-asset business by highlighting strong funds as well as explaining how individual ones fit into a portfolio, rather than just rating them.
“We are seeing people using Adviser Centre at the heart of their fund selection process,” Ms Hutchison said.
“Someone like Chase de Vere has its own fund selection team, but can use our system to take another point of view and can talk to us.”
Mr Toogood said rather than being a fund library, he and Ms Hutchison had sought to “narrow down” the fund universe of Adviser Centre into products they recommend, those that are established – closed or nearing closure – and others it has on ‘positive watch’.
He said that there were 120 funds either recommended or established now, along with 20 to 30 on ‘positive watch’, but that the total number of funds was unlikely to be larger than this.
Mr Toogood added that more than 20 fund groups had “helped us with the costs” of setting up Adviser Centre, but reiterated it was not a “pay-to-play” service, meaning the information provided was entirely independent.
The site provides information from Scopic Research to help advisers choose multi-manager funds. It also offers information about City Financial’s own multi-manager products.
